Bandai Namco Holdings resolved on November 10 to dissolve and liquidate Reflector Entertainment, the Montreal studio that made Unknown 9: Awakening. The company expects an extraordinary loss of about €21 million (roughly 3.5 billion yen) in the third quarter of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2027, and after. The notice sets no liquidation date and gives no headcount.
Unknown 9: Awakening launched October 18, 2024 on consoles and PC at $49.99. It peaked at 285 concurrent players on Steam that day and never went higher. Steam users have since left 958 reviews, 62.5 percent of them negative, for a Mostly Negative rating. The PS5 version holds a 59 on Metacritic, and 16 percent of critics on OpenCritic recommend it.
Reflector was built to be a franchise factory. Alexandre Amancio and Guy Laliberté launched it in 2017 as a company for movies, TV, games, novels and comics. Unknown 9 debuted at New York Comic-Con in 2018 with a comic and a podcast, plus a promised novel trilogy, mobile game, console game, feature film and TV series. Bandai Namco Entertainment Europe agreed to buy the studio in September 2020, when it had 120 employees. By November 2024, the publisher’s own recap of the Unknown 9 universe listed the game, a web series, a novel trilogy, a scripted podcast, a comic and The Taylor Files. The film and the TV series were not on it.
The financials show the cost. In the fiscal year ended March 31, 2025, Reflector booked CAD 47.8 million in sales against an operating loss of CAD 18.5 million and a net loss of CAD 28.4 million. Net assets stood at negative CAD 89.5 million by March 31, 2026.
The layoffs came first. In November 2024, Reflector cut about 18 percent of its workforce and said the cuts did not result from commercial success or external pressures. Two months later, CEO Hervé Hoerdt cancelled a project in the conceptualization phase, announced more layoffs and wrote in a LinkedIn statement: “This decision correlates directly with the failure of the studio’s ambitious and courageous first project, a new IP with a rich transmedia universe.”
Sweet Baby Inc. has come up in the online reaction, so here is the documented record. Sweet Baby CEO Kim Belair did not co-found Reflector. She worked there as Story Architect on Unknown 9 from February 2018 to February 2019, and she co-founded Sweet Baby in May 2018, inside that window. A 2018 Shorty Awards entry for the Unknown 9 launch credits her as “Story Architect at Sweet Baby Inc.” In March 2024, the Steam curator group Sweet Baby Inc Detected added Unknown 9: Awakening to its list, citing that entry.
Bandai Namco bought a studio whose value rested on a franchise plan, and the plan produced one game that peaked at 285 players. When a publisher pays an undisclosed sum for a universe before its first installment ships, who answers for the price?
I forgot about this game. Bandai Namco did something like this right long ago with .hack// . Maybe they thought this could be similar with games, anime, osts, etc.